Arum Drops the Obvious Truth on Shakur Stevenson’s Retirement
For reasons that he will not fully explain, WBC lightweight champion “Fearless” Shakur Stevenson (21-0, 10 KO’s) recently claimed that he is retired. Yet, it’d be easier to find a troupe of blind dart champions before discovering a significant number of folks who earnestly believed this retirement talk. Now, Stevenson’s own Top Rank promoter, Bob Arum, has conducted an interview with KO Artist Sports and completely destroyed that narrative.
“At this point in his life, he is very impetuous and he gets very disappointed if he can’t get a fight that he thinks he’s entitled to. But he is a tremendous talent and within a day after he retired, the president of the WBC, Mauricio Sauliaman called him and said, ‘Shakur, are you really retired? Because otherwise I have to take your title,’ and he says, ‘no, no, I haven’t retired!’”
THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE!!
As Bob Arum stated, there is no denying the talent and in-ring ability of Shakur Stevenson. Outside the ring however, Fearless seems to keep a part-time job making things more difficult for himself. Lately, Stevenson has seen negotiations with Emanauel Navarrete blow up in his face, walked away from negotiations with Frank Martin, lied about sending Devin Haney a fight contract and snubbed the formal fight offer presented by Team Haney.
Fibbing about being retired now is not likely to earn Fearless anymore fans or respect in the industry. Stevenson was already coming off arguably his worst professional performance in his last duel versus Edwin De Los Santos. With this being the case, now is certainly not the time that he wants to slam the brakes on whatever measure of momentum that he had going.
Seeing as how he has officially, but not publicly, highlighted his desire to come back to the sport, now we shall just have to wait. Ideally, Fearless will return to the ring sooner rather than later. In the end though, the only person that Stevenson is doing a disservice to is himself.
